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Legged robots navigating crowded scenes and complex terrains in the real world are required to execute dynamic leg movements while processing visual input for obstacle avoidance and path planning. We show that a quadruped robot can acquire…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Deepali Jain , Atil Iscen , Ken Caluwaerts

We propose a hierarchical entity-centric framework for offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) that combines subgoal decomposition with factored structure to solve long-horizon tasks in domains with multiple entities.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Dan Haramati , Carl Qi , Tal Daniel , Amy Zhang , Aviv Tamar , George Konidaris

In this work, we propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) structure which is capable of performing autonomous vehicle planning tasks in simulated environments with multiple sub-goals. In this hierarchical structure, the network…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Zhiqian Qiao , Zachariah Tyree , Priyantha Mudalige , Jeff Schneider , John M. Dolan

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) learns to make decisions on multiple levels of temporal abstraction. A key challenge in HRL is that the low-level policy changes over time, making it difficult for the high-level policy to generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Vivienne Huiling Wang , Tinghuai Wang , Joni Pajarinen

Current Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms excel in long-horizon sequential decision-making tasks but still face two challenges: delay effects and spurious correlations. To address them, we propose a causal HRL approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Chenran Zhao , Dianxi Shi , Mengzhu Wang , Jianqiang Xia , Huanhuan Yang , Songchang Jin , Shaowu Yang , Chunping Qiu

Hierarchies of temporally decoupled policies present a promising approach for enabling structured exploration in complex long-term planning problems. To fully achieve this approach an end-to-end training paradigm is needed. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Abdul Rahman Kreidieh , Glen Berseth , Brandon Trabucco , Samyak Parajuli , Sergey Levine , Alexandre M. Bayen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly applied to large-scale decision-making problems like logistics, scheduling, and recommender systems, but existing algorithms struggle with the curse of dimensionality in such large discrete action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Heiko Hoppe , Fabian Akkerman , Wouter van Heeswijk , Maximilian Schiffer

Learning in high-dimensional action spaces is a key challenge in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world systems. In this paper, we study the possibility of controlling power networks using RL methods. Power networks are critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Blazej Manczak , Jan Viebahn , Herke van Hoof

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) decomposes the policy into a manager and a worker, enabling long-horizon planning but introducing a performance gap on tasks requiring agility. We identify a root cause: in subgoal-based HRL, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Shashank Sharma , Janina Hoffmann , Vinay Namboodiri

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) promises to solve long-horizon Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks more efficiently than non-hierarchical counterparts by discovering and reusing temporally-extended skills. However, obtaining skills…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Sarthak Dayal , Abhinav Peri , Carl Qi , Claas Voelcker , Alexander Levine , Caleb Chuck , Amy Zhang

Goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is a promising approach for scaling up reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. However, it often suffers from training inefficiency as the action space of the high-level, i.e., the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Tianren Zhang , Shangqi Guo , Tian Tan , Xiaolin Hu , Feng Chen

We present HiDe, a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning architecture that successfully solves long horizon control tasks and generalizes to unseen test scenarios. Functional decomposition between planning and low-level control is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-08 Sammy Christen , Lukas Jendele , Emre Aksan , Otmar Hilliges

Offline Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown potent in many safe-critical tasks in robotics where exploration is risky and expensive. However, it still struggles to acquire skills in temporally extended tasks. In this paper, we study the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Jinning Li , Chen Tang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Wei Zhan

Large language models excel at short-horizon reasoning tasks, but performance drops as reasoning horizon lengths increase. Existing approaches to combat this rely on inference-time scaffolding or costly step-level supervision, neither of…

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approaches have shown successful results in solving a large variety of complex, structured, long-horizon problems. Nevertheless, a full theoretical understanding of this empirical evidence is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Gianluca Drappo , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Most meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) methods learn to adapt to new tasks by directly optimizing the parameters of policies over primitive action space. Such algorithms work well in tasks with relatively slight difference. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Haotian Fu , Hongyao Tang , Jianye Hao , Wulong Liu , Chen Chen

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) enhances the scalability of decision-making in long-horizon tasks by introducing temporal abstraction through options-policies that span multiple timesteps. Despite its theoretical appeal, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Hemanath Arumugam , Falong Fan , Bo Liu

Robots have been successfully used to perform tasks with high precision. In real-world environments with sparse rewards and multiple goals, learning is still a major challenge and Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms fail to learn good…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Tejaswini Manjunath , Mozhgan Navardi , Prakhar Dixit , Bharat Prakash , Tinoosh Mohsenin

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) exploits temporally extended actions, or options, to make decisions from a higher-dimensional perspective to alleviate the sparse reward problem, one of the most challenging problems in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Libo Xing

The options framework in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning breaks down overall goals into a combination of options or simpler tasks and associated policies, allowing for abstraction in the action space. Ideally, these options can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Kushal Chauhan , Soumya Chatterjee , Akash Reddy , Balaraman Ravindran , Pradeep Shenoy